DARPA recently joined the U.S. Air Force to do in-air testing of an F-16 fighter jet using an artificial intelligence (AI) agent to autonomously control its flight.
The milestone advances the technological infrastructure that will enable rapid, scalable combat AI development across the joint force. Officials said the aircraft is one of a group of F-16s that have been converted to an autonomous-capable platform under the Viper Experimentation and Next-Generation Operations Model (VENOM) program, a joint effort between the Air Force and DARPA under the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program.
“These groundbreaking flight tests of VENOM-modified F-16s advance the infrastructure needed to develop trusted, autonomous air combat capabilities,” Brig. Gen. James “Fangs” Valpiani, Ph.D., DARPA program manager, said. “The Air Force and DARPA team has automated flight controls and sensors on a standard F-16 without changing the jet’s core software. This enables an efficient pipeline for developing dominant AI for aerial combat, allowing us to rapidly innovate for the warfighter.”
The VENOM Autonomy Kit (VAK), designed and integrated under the DARPA ACE program, uses a novel interface with the aircraft’s flight controls and mission systems that allows a pilot to toggle between human control and AI control, ensuring a safe, reliable environment for human-on-the-loop experimentation.
DARPA said moving forward, the VENOM aircraft will serve as the cornerstone for the next phase of AI development under its Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements (AIR) program, which will leverage the VENOM fleet to test AI agents in live-flight scenarios. The testing, DARPA said, will pave the way for human pilots to command and orchestrate teams of autonomous, uncrewed aircraft.
“The emerging threat environment, especially as it relates to aerial combat, is growing increasingly complex,” Valpiani said. “AI has tremendous potential to help humans manage this complexity in beyond-visual-range combat, but many hard questions remain concerning the performance and trustworthiness of combat AI in the extreme fog and friction of modern warfare. The AIR program aims to apply cutting-edge combat agents to operationally relevant scenarios to address these questions and field war-deterring, war-winning capabilities to our warfighters.”